Peace on Earth (21 page)

“Most respectfully. You have been treated most respectfully up to now.”

“Because it was in the Agency’s interest, and perhaps in the interest of others as well. Or are you telling me I was saved and protected out of the goodness of your hearts?”

“No. Goodness doesn’t enter into it. As I said before, the stakes are too high. So high, that had we been able to extract what we want from you by torturing you to death, that would have been done long ago.”

An unexpected thought came to me. I turned, my back to the now dark window, and smiled, crossing my arms on my chest.

“Thank you, professor. Only now do I understand who has really been protecting me all this time.”

“But I told you.”

“But I know better. It is
they
…” And opening the window, I pointed at the moon rising above the trees, a sharp white crescent against the dark blue sky.

The professor said nothing.

“It must have something to do with my landing,” I went on. “With the fact that I went down myself to take what the last remote found, which I could do because there was a spacesuit and lander in the bay. They put them there just in case, and I used them. True, I don’t remember what happened to me when I stood on the moon with my own two feet. I remember and don’t remember. I found the remote but I don’t think it was the molecular one. I remember that I knew why I came down: not to save it, which was impossible and made no sense, but to take something. A sample? Of what? That’s what I can’t recall. The callotomy itself I either didn’t feel or don’t remember, as with amnesia after a concussion, but when I returned to the ship and put my spacesuit back into its special closet, I remember how it was covered with a fine, soft powder. A strange powder, dry between your fingers, like salt, yet difficult to wipe off your hands. It wasn’t radioactive. But I washed as if it had been. Later I didn’t even try to find out what the stuff was, though I didn’t have the opportunity anyway to ask such questions. When I learned that my brain had been severed, I was too taken up with that trouble to think about my hour on the moon. Did you hear anything about that powder? Like talcum. Anyway, I brought
something
back … but what?”

My visitor squinted at me through his pince-nez, poker-faced.

“You’re warm,” he said. “Even hot… Yes, you brought back something… That’s probably why you returned alive despite your landing.”

He got up and came to where I stood. We both looked at the moon, innocent and bright among the stars.

“The molecular LEMs remained behind,” my visitor said as if to himself. “But, let us hope, destroyed beyond duplication! You destroyed your own although you didn’t know it, when you went to the bay for your spacesuit. That activated the autodestruct program. I can tell you this now because it no longer matters.”

“For a neurological consultant you are remarkably well informed,” I said, my eyes still on the moon as it went behind a cloud. “Perhaps you even know what came back with me. Was that
their
micropes, that powder so unlike ordinary sand?…”

“No. As far as I know, just silicon-based polymers.”

“And not a virus?”

“No.”

“Then why is it so important?”

“Because it accompanied you back.”

“The spacesuit closet lost its hermetic seal?”

“No. Most likely you inhaled some of the particles while in the rocket, getting out of your suit.”

“And they’re in me?”

“I don’t know if they still are. The fact that it wasn’t normal moon dust we learned when you ran off to Australia.”

“Ah! Every place I’ve been has been put under a microscope?”

“More or less.”

“And … they were found?”

He nodded. We were standing at the window, and the moon sailed through the clouds.

“Does everybody know?”

“Everybody?”

“All the interested parties…”

“Probably not yet. At the Agency, only a few people, and in the clinical department only I.”

“Why did you tell me?”

“You were on the track of it yourself, besides I want you to understand the situation.”

“My situation?”

“Yours and in general.”

“So they’re keeping me under observation?”

“I don’t know to what extent. There are different levels of secrecy here. Based on what I’ve heard from a couple of friends, completely off the record, research is still in progress and they haven’t yet ruled out the possibility that those particles are in contact with the moon…”

“What kind of contact? Radio?”

“Definitely not.”

“Another means of communication?”

“I flew here to ask you a few questions and you’re grilling me.”

“You said you came to fill me in on my situation.”

“But I can’t answer questions to which I don’t know the answers.”

“In a nutshell, then, I have been protected so far by the
possibility
that the moon is interested in my fate and can step in…?”

Shapiro didn’t answer. The room was dark. He walked over and turned on the light, which hurt my eyes and also brought me back to earth. I pulled the curtain, took a decanter and two glasses from the bar, and poured what was left of the sherry. I gave him a glass, pointed to the armchair, and sat down.

“Chi va piano
,
va sano,”
the professor said unexpectedly. Only wetting his lips with the sherry, he put the glass on the desk and sat down with a sigh. “Human beings always proceed according to a model,” he said. “In a case like this, however, there are no models. And yet we must act, because no good will come of procrastination. Nor does guesswork help us any. As a neurologist I can say this much: There is short-term memory and long-term memory. The short-term turns into long-term if there are no violent disruptions. It is hard to imagine a disruption more violent than the severing of the great commissure! Therefore what happened just before and immediately after that event does not exist in your memory. As for the warfare on the moon, we don’t even know who is attacking and who is defending. No nation will ever admit that its programmers didn’t follow the directives of the Geneva Agreement, which everyone signed. But even if one of those programmers came forward and confessed, it would be of little use, because neither he nor anyone else knows what course things have taken on the moon. And you … are about as safe in this asylum as in a den of lions. You think I exaggerate? In any case you won’t be here forever.”

“A long conversation,” I said, “and yet we go in circles. What you want is for me to put myself in your hands?” I tapped the right side of my head.

“I think you should. I personally doubt that it will help either you or the Agency that much, but I see nothing better.”

“Your skepticism may be only to disarm me…” I muttered to myself as if thinking aloud. “Are the effects of a callotomy absolutely irreversible?”

“If it was done surgically, the severed white matter would definitely not grow back. But your skull, I believe, was not cut into…?”

“I see,” I answered after a moment of thought. “You offer the hope that something different could have happened to me. Either to tempt me, or you believe it a little yourself…”

“And your decision?”

“I’ll tell you within forty-eight hours. All right?”

He nodded and pointed at the card on the blotter.

“My number.”

“You mean we’ll do this in the open?”

“Yes and no. No one will pick up the receiver. You will wait ten rings and phone again after one minute. And wait ten rings again and hang up.”

“And that will mean I agree?”

He nodded and rose. “We’ll take care of the rest. But now I must go. Good night.”

After he left, I stood awhile in the middle of the room, staring vacantly at the curtain. Suddenly the ceiling light went out. The bulb blew, I thought, but when I looked out the window, I saw that all the buildings of the asylum were dark. Even the distant lights on the ramp to the highway were out. It had to be a power failure. My watch said eleven. I didn’t feel like hunting for a flashlight or candles, so I opened the curtain and in the weak light of the moon undressed and took a shower in my small bathroom. Deciding to put on a bathrobe instead of pajamas, I opened the closet door and froze. Someone was standing there, fat, short, almost completely bald, as rigid as a statue, his finger to his lips. It was Kramer.

“Adelaide,” I said but stopped because he shook his finger sharply. He pointed at the window. When I didn’t move, he got down and crawled on all fours around the desk and to the window, and carefully reached up and closed the curtain. It was so dark that I could hardly see him return to the closet, still on his hands and knees, and take out something rectangular and flat, but when my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw that Kramer was opening a briefcase, sorting through strings or wires, connecting something, then there was a snap, and, sitting on the rug, he whispered:

“Come over here, Tichy, and we’ll talk…”

I sat beside him, too surprised to say anything. Kramer moved closer, his knees touching mine, and said quietly:

“We have at least three-quarters of an hour before the power goes back on. Some of the bugging devices are on batteries but they’re low-tech and we have first-class screening. Tichy, you can keep calling me Kramer, Kramer will do…”

“Who are you?” I asked, and heard him chuckle.

“Your guardian angel.”

“But haven’t you been here a long time? How could you know I would come to this asylum? Surely Tarantoga…”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Kramer replied mildly. “There are more important things for you to think about, Tichy. For example, I would not advise you to do what Shapiro says. That would be the worst thing you could do.”

I was silent, and Kramer chuckled again. He was obviously in a good mood. His voice was different, not as drawling as before, and there was nothing asinine about the man now.

“You think I am an ‘agent of a foreign power,’ yes?” he said, clapping me on the back. “I understand, you are suspicious in eighteen different ways, but let me appeal to your reason. Suppose you take Professor Shapiro’s advice. They’ll get you in their clutches, without torture, God forbid, no, in their clinic you’ll be treated like the President himself. They’ll pull something out of the right side of your head, or they won’t, either way it will make no difference, because the verdict has already been delivered.”

“What verdict?”

“The diagnosis, the results of the scientific auscultation, through your arm, leg, foot, who cares? Please don’t interrupt, I’m telling you everything. Everything that’s known.”

He paused, as if waiting for my go-ahead. We were sitting in the dark. Suddenly I said:

“Dr. House might come.”

“He won’t. No one will come, don’t fret about that. We’re not playing cowboys and Indians here. Pay attention now. On the moon the programs of different parties have been going after each other. Who started it is not important, at least not now. To put it very simply, there’s a cancer proliferating there. The mutual production of chaos, the interpenetration of weapons both hardware and software, the blows and counterblows, call it what you like.”

“The moon has gone mad?”

“In a sense, yes. When the programs as well as what they created were destroyed, altogether new processes began, processes no one on Earth foresaw.”

“What were they?”

Kramer sighed.

“I’d light a cigarette now,” he said, “but can’t, because you don’t smoke. What were they? You brought back the first evidence.”

“That dust on my spacesuit?”

“It’s silicon polymers, the beginning, the scientists say, of an orthogenesis, the birth of nonliving organisms. What’s taking place up there is no threat to Earth, and yet for that very reason the Agency sees a threat.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Agency stands guard over the doctrine of ignorance. There are nations that seek the end of that doctrine, of the whole business of packing weapons off to the moon. But it’s more complicated than that. Different interest groups exist, and some would like to see a growing panic under the rubric of The Moon Invades Earth, so that a coalition will form, in the UN or outside it, to strike preemptively, whether in the traditional way, which means thermonuclear, or with that new quantum gravity collapsar technology, don’t ask me about it now, I’ll tell you later. What they want is to arm on a grand scale, a global scale, for if a true invasion threatens, it would be necessary to crush it before it begins.”

“And the Agency doesn’t want that?”

“The Agency itself is torn. Each interest group has its people in it. Otherwise the Agency would not represent Earth. You have become a trump card in this game. Possibly the highest.”

“I? Because of my problem?”

“Exactly. Whatever information Shapiro and his crew get out of you cannot be verified, after all. Except for a few people no one will know whether they really learned something or only said they did and that they would soon announce it to the public or first go with it to the Security Council. But the announcing doesn’t matter. The point is that no one, including you, will know whether they are lying or telling the truth.”

“It would probably be a lie, since you said before that the verdict has already been delivered…”

“That’s how it looks. But I am not omniscient. In any case they can’t use force on you.”

“But Shapiro said…”

“The attempted abductions? But they were arranged, Tichy, in such a way that you would not lose your life. Because if you did, no one would have anything.”

“Who were they?”

“Different parties and for different purposes. First, to
have
you. Later, when such efforts were foiled, to frighten you a little, push you, soften you up, so you would run into the welcoming arms of Shapiro.”

“Wait, are you saying that the Agency itself … that the later attacks were staged?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Suppose that nevertheless I let them examine me. What would happen?”

“Bridge or poker.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The game, the bidding. One can foresee the beginning but not what follows. It’s clear that on the moon things didn’t happen as they were supposed to. We’re left with the question: Is or is not Earth in danger? So far everything suggests there is no danger and will be none for the next few hundred years, being very conservative. Perhaps for the next few thousand years or even million. But politics cannot think in such distant terms. We can sleep peacefully till the year three thousand. But many do not want to sleep peacefully. Many need a harmless moon.”